


recommend such a setting site

by vlieger



Category: NCIS
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-07
Updated: 2012-08-07
Packaged: 2017-11-11 16:11:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/480378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vlieger/pseuds/vlieger





	recommend such a setting site

At Mossad they teach you not to hope. The first thing to understand about everyone you meet is that they won't live long enough to see out the natural course of your relationship. There is no _maybe_ , there is no _what if_ , there isn't even a _probably_. Still, it's not often you meet someone headed so quickly for the exit. Dead Man Walking, as Tony so eloquently puts it. 

"Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, nineteen ninety-five," he says. "Good movie. 'Course, that dead man was on death row for murder and rape, and --"

"Tony," snaps Ziva.

"-- this guy's a handsome Navy Lieutenant with a million dollar smile and a face you can't place but still insist you've seen before," Tony continues, unperturbed. He tilts his head. "You sure it isn't fate, Zi- _vah?_ " He's smiling, but his eyes are shrewd, narrowed. 

"There is no such thing," she says. "If I know his face, it is because I have seen it before."

"Okay," says Tony, flipping through his notepad. 

Ziva turns away, watching Lieutenant Sanders through his glass hospital walls. 

 

"What's it like being an NCIS agent?" Roy asks her, shifting his head on his pillow.

"I am not an NCIS agent," says Ziva. 

Roy furrows his brow.

"Mossad," says Ziva, tilting her chin. It's mostly unconcsious defensiveness. 

"Wow," says Roy. "Should I be worried?"

"Only if you are hiding something," says Ziva.

Roy grins. He taps his nose and leans closer to the edge of the bed, whispering, "When I'm at home, and it's on, I like to watch The O.C. Don't tell anyone."

Ziva wrinkles her nose. "I do not know what that is," she says. 

"Maybe I'll show you sometime." Roy laughs. "I'm pretty sure you'd hate it."

Ziva smiles down at her hands, clasped in her lap. 

 

"You placed him yet?" Gibbs asks in the bullpen.

"Personal connection," says Ziva.

She doesn't miss the half-second lag in the conversation. Ziva sets her mouth and thinks about Lieutenant Sanders in the hospital, Lieutenant Sanders with radiation poisoning, Lieutenant Sanders dying, and not Roy running her route in the pale, early mornings, Roy with his ridiculous orange beanie, his perfectly weighted stride, and oh so alive. 

 

The hospital room is washed of all colour, and Roy with it, his paper-thin, white skin mottled with bruises that would look almost like tricks of the light, the play of shadows dancing about the room, if Ziva didn't know exactly how each one came to be there. One on his elbow when he reached for the water on his bedside table and missed, one on the inside of each forearm when he pressed them too hard into the arms of his chair, one on his bicep when the nurse injected some of his medication, and one below his patella when he tripped getting back into bed, all staining his skin like overeager fingers pressed too hard into delicate pieces of fruit. 

"You have no colour," Ziva says abruptly. Her thoughts are too loud, the sterility too pressing. She isn't used to this quiet waiting, this uselessness of action. She doesn't like it.

Roy blinks at her.

"You look terrible," Ziva amends.

Roy's mouth crooks in a tired half-smile. "Thanks," he says. "I did my hair especially."

"I didn not mean," Ziva cuts herself off. "I think we should go for a walk. The fresh air will do you good."

"Okay," says Roy. He pushes himself further up along the pillows, and adds, "I might need a little help."

"I'm not trying to hit on you," he says, when Ziva has him upright, an arm around his waist and his draped over her shoulders. "Or well, I am, but it's just convenient that I also happen to be incapable of walking without you holding me up."

Ziva chuckles. "Quiet," she says. "Save your energy for walking."

 

In the gardens his bruises look more like battle wounds, blood-coloured hospital marks faded in the sun, and his cheeks are flushed pink along the bones. 

Ziva says, "See, you look better already," and looks up through the trees so she doesn't have to see Roy's smile, and the flutter of something terrifyingly like hope in her chest is just an echo of the quivering sunlight on the leaves, nothing gained, nothing lost. 

 

She watches him sleep, the lines of his face touched only with the very fingertips of light from the corridor outside his room. His wrist brushes her forearm when he shifts, and she thinks, suddenly, viciously, that Mossad is full of hypocrites, because what is the attempt to quench all predilection for hope but hope itself? Yet she tries, because it hurts less. 

Because Mossad is right to make her. 

"I am weak," she says quietly, "And you are dying."

"Not dying," says Roy. 

Ziva blinks. Usually she's better at knowing when people are pretending to sleep. 

"You could kiss me," says Roy. "Like the princesses in the fairytales."

"Are you saying you are a princess?" Ziva quirks a smile. 

"No," says Roy. "I'm saying this time maybe the princess has to save the prince. We princes need a break sometimes, you know, we work very hard saving all those damsels."

"Go to sleep," says Ziva. "Conserve your strength."

Roy closes his eyes obediently, smirking a little. 

Ziva leans forward and presses her lips, dry, to the skin low down on his cheek, just past the corner of his mouth. He half-lifts a hand, and she says, "Sleep," and leans back, watching the smirk soften as he does, the rhythmic flutter of his lashes, breathing shallow, exhausted. 

 

At Mossad they try to teach you not to hope. It's easy to understand that no one you meet will live long enough to see out the natural course of your relationship. Still, it's not often you meet someone headed so quickly for the exit. It's such a disconcertingly literal manifestation of the rule that it threatens to throw her off entirely. Her Mossad trainers couldn't have come up with a better scenario for roleplay. The dealbreaker, of course, is that at Mossad, they don't teach you how to shrug off a smile like his, or how to walk away when you can't, or what to do when someone fights so hard you start to believe he'll pull through right up until he doesn't.


End file.
